I have always been blessed with the ability to sleep. I rarely toss and turn and somehow relish my time asleep. Nowadays I do often wake during the night owing to the need to pee, and sometimes find that I don’t feel ready to go straight back to sleep afterwards. Then I get up, make myself a cup of hot water, and spend half an hour reading The Economist, after which I am invariably able to get back to sleep quickly.
This is how I often end up reading the six leaders in an Economist issue in one sitting, along with the news in brief and briefing sections. The leaders are always insightful, tightly argued, courageous and balanced. I find that The Economist journalism just gets better and better, in contrast to almost everything else that crosses my path.
I find it especially valuable now in the time of war, where emotion and sentiment tend to drown cold logic. We are quick to condemn the propaganda of the other side, but we should be especially alert at these times to groupthink and propaganda from our own side. Some of it may indeed be state sponsored, but even where it is not, journalists can become emotional and pander to the need to give their readers what they yearn to hear. So we are fed a constant diet of blather about plucky Ukrainians and evil Russians and we can easily lose our sense of balance and the bigger picture. There is no doubt of the primary blame for this war, but real life is always more complex than a marvel movie.
The Economist rises above this in war, and that reminds me that its same logical approach avoids similar traps over less fraught topics too. The magazine does have its blind spots. It is written by intelligent, educated, globally aware journalists who mix in circles or similar people. Most of these are somewhat wealthy and anxious to protect their advantages and pass some of them to their children. So maintaining legal rights and relative stability of capital and property always ranks number one among the values of the magazine. That leads to a strong bias towards free markets and by extension to the established Western model of democracy. That devotion can drift into tribalism at times, and I also believe that there is a secret deal with MI5 that leads to occasional articles that are little more than NATO propaganda.
Sometimes I play a game with myself after reading the six Economist leaders. In that game I take the six articles as a group and seek connections and inconsistencies. This technique is documented as effective in business innovation and in culture: you take two or three seemingly unconnected topics at random and force yourself to merge them somehow. That is a great way to create breakthroughs.
I played my game this week. The six leader articles were generally excellent, and as usual they covered economics, politics and social issues and many regions of the world.
The first leader was about saving the US Supreme Court, and that was also the topic of the briefing that followed. It was a depressing read. The key argument is that Congress broke several decades ago, and that is the root cause of the presidency, the Supreme Court and even aspects of civil society starting to break in turn. The problem is that, while plentiful solutions are evident, none is remotely likely to happen. Indeed, the disease seems almost certain to worsen and to spread. The best The Economist could offer as something useful to advocate for that might conceivably happen is an improved code of ethics for judges.
Next came a lovely optimistic leader about wearables, also the topic of the Technology Quarterly later in the issue. Technology has reached a tipping point whereby personalised medicine can become ubiquitous and life-changing, thanks in part to devices we can keep on our bodies providing constant data. Much of this innovation is being led in the US, and slowly the inertia of the medical profession is being overcome, and such devices are moving from the hipster fringes into truly useful areas. So far I have avoided devices that tell me that I am anxious because my sleep patterns are unhealthy, thereby making it harder to sleep and adding anxiety. Perhaps it is time to be rather less cynical.
The third leader was an Economist classic about short-term global economic prospects. It continued the gloomy recent drumbeat of such articles and predicted more trouble ahead, with the Ukraine war, covid in China and overheating in the US as factors indicating pessimism. The mindset of this article was clearly one of an investor with existing assets to protect. Implications for inequality, climate change or anything else were nowhere to be seen.
The fourth leader was the weakest, and MI5 may have had a hand in it. The topic was how the West should react to China’s policy of developing coastal military bases around the world. To be fair, there was some credence given to China’s opinions on the topic, but the dominant attitude was one of controlling China rather than envisioning a world where China would not need to be controlled. The grudging conclusion was that little could be done beyond the ugly policy of bribing (or blackmailing) nations to favour the West. Surely that leads us straight into a new cold war?
The fifth leader was about the precipitous decline of journalistic freedom around the globe. Powerfully, it started by asking if the war in Ukraine could have started if Russia had an effective free press, and whether Covid could have been stifled at its onset if China had one. This was an excellent article, but I found a flaw. Autocratic and faux democratic regimes do indeed do enormous damage by manipulating the press, but for me the press is stifled in democracies too when moneyed interests come to dominate. Mention of Rupert Murdoch (or the spectre of Elon Musk owning Twitter) would have improved the leader.
The final leader was about Russian wealth in London, how it was cynically welcomed and has become difficult to escape from. It argued for increasing budgets and profile of monitoring agencies and for regulating law firms more stringently, correctly asserting that such measures would probably be too little and too late.
So where are the connections within this disparate set of articles? I think the starting point is an accommodation between the West and China. Leader four shows where blind ideological confrontation leads, while leader three shows how painful a full economic decoupling would be. We should accept that there are strengths in both the Western and the Chinese models. In conflict, both will end up restricting press freedom (leader five) on their own ways, and leader six demonstrates clearly that the West has no monopoly on laudable values. We like to claim that the sort of innovation highlighted in leader two, innovation which indeed is the key to driving humanity forward, is more likely in the Western system, but that claim is starting to wear rather hollow, and I suspect that the execution of value from wearables for all citizens may occur more quickly in China, and that as America polarises and stagnates politically (leader one) it will lead in fewer and fewer fields.
If the West had a working accommodation with China, then power could be transferred safely to international institutions both militarily (leader four) and economically (leader three), and everything could benefit, including open dialogue (leader five) and innovation (leader two). Excluded rogue states would be treated as they warrant rather than hypocritically (leader one).
Sadly, this intellectual flight of fancy finishes exactly where it starts, with leader one. A stymied America has no chance whatsoever of reaching such an accommodation, even as it progressively loses battle after battle in the new cold war it has so foolishly declared. Is there a way out of the maze? I fear the solution is only available to America, and I am not holding my breath.
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